Very well executed

Thanks for the memories!

Powerful

As Good As It Gets

Hollywood had a huge love affair with westerns up until about 1960. Most of the ways they portrayed the west were complete nonsense and they had a habit of injecting real-life characters into situations that never occurred. Heck, the lives of Billy the Kid, Jesse James, Wyatt Earp and Bill Hickok are completely unrecognizable in the hundreds and hundreds of films in which they appear. "Young Bill Hickok" is yet another one of these entirely fictitious films from this era and it even throws in Calamity Jane (a rather unattractive woman in real life) to boot. Playing so fast and loose with the truth drives history teachers like me crazy, but my love of a fun B-movie kept me watching.Roy Rogers plays Bill Hickok and he looked even less like Bill than Gabby Hays who is on hand (as usual) to play Roy's loyal sidekick. As for the plot, it's all a lot of nonsense about Bill tracking down some Confederate raiders and their unknown leader as well as Bill wanting to marry a Southern lady. I won't bother going into any more details as none of it seemed to bear any semblance to Hickok's life.Overall, the film is a pretty ordinary Roy Rogers film. There's lots of singing for no apparent reason, Hays is quite funny in support and in the end good triumphs over evil. The only moment of the film that really caught my attention was the jail break--that was very clever and you just need to see it. Worth seeing for Rogers fans--otherwise just another one of 23281235413 B-series westerns.

In the final days of the Civil War, young Bill Hickock (Roy Rogers) is sent by the War Department to deliver a shipment of gold for the Union cause. Acting as a decoy, he sends the gold with Gabby Hayes and Hayes' sidekick Calamity Jane (!), hoping to outsmart the European backed saboteurs that want to take it.Not so wild this time around, Young Bill Hickock's bland script takes too much time getting started and doesn't really generate much excitement or great music. This Republic Picture does have some decent production values though.Astonishingly, the script veers into JFK style conspiracy theories near the end, with European powers using John Wilkes Booth as a pawn in order to divide the US again, in order to gain control of the west! However, it's still not enough to make this really worth recommending, except for maybe the most die-hard Roy Rogers fans.The best thing in the movie is the feisty performance by Sally Payne as Calamity Jane. She's pretty cute and does a good job.

Roy Rogers stars as "Young Bill Hickok", saving California and its gold from wicked invaders like John Miljan (as Nicholas Tower)… against a Civil War back-story… with references to Abraham Lincoln and John Wilkes Booth. This time George "Gabby" Hayes brings along his niece, none other than Calamity Jane (well played by Sally Payne) to assist Mr. Rogers. It's an interesting team-up concept, however unlikely.The film's highlight is its posse / stagecoach chase scene, near the film's end. Rogers and Yakima Canutt -- I assume the stuntman is the stunning Mr. Canutt -- perform well in an exciting man-under-the-stage sequence. That sequence followed one of the typical Rogers songs. Otherwise, this is nothing more than a fair Rogers western. *** Young Bill Hickok (1940) Joseph Kane ~ Roy Rogers, George 'Gabby' Hayes, Sally Payne

In the beginning of his career, Roy Rogers actually played characters other than people named Roy Rogers. Here he's Wild Bill Hickok who foils a dastardly plot hatched by an unnamed foreign country to detach the west coast from the union by fomenting outlaw trouble during the Civil War.John Miljan is the villain here, performing in the best Snidely Whiplash tradition. He's only the west coast top guy, he does receive instructions from the east, Roy finds a letter addressed to Miljan signed by John Wilkes Booth. Amazing Miljan was able to keep a straight face through the whole procedure.Actually amazing that Roy kept a straight face too. Gabby Hayes is around to lend Roy a helping hand and actress Sally Payne as Calamity Jane is the best thing here. Her performance is remarkably similar to the one given by Doris Day in another 14 years.This film is not unusual in that it was in a tradition at the time with B Westerns to take famous names in history and create wholly fictional plots around them. That's a tradition I'm glad we've stopped.